January 19, 2013

The February 2013 issue of Scientific American has a piece on citizen science and understanding things like bird migration... more here and much more in the issue.

(sorry for the use of a Flash player - its all they offered)

The February 2013 issue of Scientific American has a piece on citizen science and understanding things like bird migration... more here and much more in the issue.

snip

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Nearly as amazing, amateur scientists (maybe some of you reading this story) played a large part in creating them. Thousands of volunteers with the eBird project have been collecting and sharing up to millions of bird observations each month for the past 10 years. Without such armies of laypeople as observers, such data sets would otherwise be out of reach or impossible to obtain. (For more about this burgeoning field and its impact on science, read Hillary Rosner's feature, “Data on Wings,” in the February issue of Scientific American.) Those eBird data have been combined with remote-sensed information on climate, habitat, night flight calls and other variables to generate spatiotemporal exploratory models (aka migration forecasts) as well as more static “birdcasts” (weekly migration forecasts for birders focusing on seasonal species and the impact of weather), estimates of how far birds fly, and myriad other insights.

January 18, 2013

Andrea Seabrook quit her NPR Capital Hill beat out of frustration and started a small independent news service called DecodeDC. She offers background pieces roughly once a month and all have been fascinating. During rowing today I caught number 6 - highly recommended. If you listen to podcasts, I recommend subscribing and throwing her a coin is also a good use of donation funds.

Dementia does not cause an equal fading of the mind. While memory may be severely impacted, other areas - including creative areas - can remain intact until the end. Sara recommends this link which is the page for the film I Remember Better When I Paint.

While I'm a believer in physical education in schools, it is physical education for everyone - something that isn't necessarily that expensive and something that, when properly done, can have a long term positive health benefit on individuals and society.

Sports are a different matter. Some sports at the University level have become ridiculously expensive and analysis of the costs show they are money sinks for most schools. With college costs rising, one wonders how and why this continues. Why are sports associated with colleges?

The Delta report builds on the work of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which in 2010 released “Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports,” which compared academic and athletic spending at colleges and universities and made recommendations for “restoring academic values” and “strengthening accountability for intercollegiate athletics.”

Whether comparing per-student academic funding and per-athlete funding for athletics is valuable to the debate is an open question. Many in higher education argue that participation in Division I athletics generates benefits for the entire institution, including donations, applications, regional economic returns, school spirit and even state support.

But if those returns are true (which both the report and recentresearchquestion), the new Delta report says that may not be enough to justify the divergent trends in academic and athletic spending, especially during an economic downturn. “Possible benefits aside, comparisons of spending on athletics and academics raise questions about institutional priorities and whether rising athletic subsidies are appropriate, particularly in the current budgetary environment,” the report states. “For many institutions, spending on athletics is sacrosanct, even when academic spending (such as for faculty pay and academic programs) is being cut or frozen.”

The report did not explore the financing of Division II or Division III programs.